Remember when your third grade teacher told you to “check your work?” Yeah, well, everything you need to know about verifying your vote you learned in 3rd grade.

In the following video, Jackson County, WV (where stories of voteflipping about this early voting season) County Clerk Jeff Waybright demonstrates that an uncalibrated – and supposedly calibrated – ES&S iVotronic voting machine will actually flip votes.

Votes flip so check your work and verify your vote. In the words of citizen Waybright, “You should never leave the voting booth without voting for who you wanted to vote for.

(Nov. 2) – In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

WASHINGTON – If Barack Obama goes on to win the election, there will be plenty of ink and video spent on chronicling the historic nature of the turnout among young voters and African-Americans.

But as important as both constituencies have been to Obama — particularly in the primaries — it’s Hispanics that could be putting him over the top on Nov. 4.

Obama’s dominance among Hispanics in the West is proving to be the difference maker in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. In addition, the increased numbers of non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida, as well as the growing Hispanic population in North Carolina and Virginia, could be the tipping voting group in those three states.

So how did this happen? When this general election began, there were three pieces of evidence cited to develop the conventional wisdom that Obama would under-perform with Hispanics:

He lost Hispanics by very wide margins to Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

John McCain’s efforts to fight his party on the issue of immigration, in addition to his Southwestern political roots, would win him votes with Hispanics.

Hispanics are perceived to be hesitant to vote for black candidates. Of course, there was only anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon in a few big city mayoral contests.

As it turns out, Clinton won the demographic because she courted them heavily and used Bill Clinton to campaign as a familiar advocate for Hispanics.

As for McCain, despite his best efforts (as well as that of President Bush and Karl Rove), the Republican brand has been tainted, potential for the long-term, due to the negative tone of the immigration debate that took place on conservative talk radio and in the presidential primaries.

In fact, McCain’s immigration stance was so damaging that it is what nearly derailed his candidacy in mid-2007, not Iraq as the campaign sometimes likes to claim.

WASHINGTON — The national and state Democratic parties are spending far more heavily than their Republican counterparts on field operations, after years of ceding the advantage in ground-level organizing to the Republican voter-turnout machine.

Finance records show Democrats have hired five to 10 times more paid field staff in swing states than the Republicans.

Democrats have set up 770 offices nationwide, including in some of the most Republican areas of traditionally “red” states — like one in Goshen, Ind., a manufacturing town with a population of about 30,000. It is the seat of Elkhart County, which voted for President George W. Bush in 2004 by more than 40 percentage points. By comparison, Republicans have about 370 offices nationwide.

The focus on the ground-game is a change from past election cycles, when the Democratic party’s prime objective was getting as many broadcast ads on the air as possible. In recent campaigns, Democrats outsourced their ground organization to outside groups, such as labor unions and liberal activists.

The year’s change is made possible by Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s historic fundraising. His campaign is doing its own advertising, taking that pricey burden off the parties. Campaign-finance data show the Democratic Party has essentially ceded television advertising to Sen. Obama’s campaign. In 2004, the Democratic Party spent nearly $120 million on advertising in support of then-nominee John Kerry, compared to only $500,000 this fall.

And the Obama campaign also is pouring money into state-party budgets. The senator’s presidential campaign along with the Democratic National Committee have put at least $112 million into state parties in recent months, a review of campaign-finance filings shows. They have poured $6 million into both North Carolina and Virginia and even sent $1.8 million into Montana — nearly two dollars for every resident of that state.

“We really feel that this election is going to come down to our ground organization and what happens in the final days of the campaign,” said Jen O’Malley, the Obama campaign’s battleground-states director.

Four years ago, the party’s get-out-the-vote effort was largely run by an independent group named America Coming Together, or ACT, which was financed with $164 million from rich liberals but legally prevented from coordinating with their candidate. The group was criticized by some Democrats for not reaching deep enough into the outer suburbs and rural areas, where Republicans were victorious. ACT was also legally restricted when it came to mentioning candidates, and was fined $775,000 after allegedly attacking President Bush in its voter drives.

Republicans say their volunteer-based turnout machinery from 2004 is intact and more than twice as productive as last cycle in making phone calls and house calls. “This operation is working on all eight cylinders,” said Rich Beeson, the political director of the Republican National Committee and a veteran of the 2004 effort. “It’s doing what it was designed to do.” The party has been honing the same model for eight years, developing veteran volunteers who often work full-time without pay.

Republican spending on field staff has grown just slightly since 2004, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis covering reports from the presidential campaigns, as well as national and state parties. The GOP spent an estimated $22 million on personnel from June 1 to Oct. 15, compared to $19 million over the same period in 2004.

Democrats have increased their staff expenditures from $30 million to $56 million — and they employed an estimated 4,500 workers making more than $1,500 a month as of mid-October, the latest information available. Sen. McCain and the Republicans had about 1,100 at that point.

The expansion was made possible by Sen. Obama’s decision to decline public financing for his campaign, freeing himself from its spending caps. Instead he has relied on the legions of supporters who have already contributed over $600 million.

Sen. McCain is limited to spending the $84.1 million he accepted from the government after his September nomination. Sen. Obama is on track to spend more on television advertising than any candidate in history, likely spending more than $100 million on ads in October alone.

WASHINGTON — They are some of the more memorable slip-ups or slights within the news media’s coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.

A Fox News anchor asks whether Senator Barack Obama and his wife had greeted each other with a “terrorist fist jab.” Rush Limbaugh calls military personnel critical of the war in Iraq “phony soldiers.” Mr. Limbaugh and another Fox host repeat an accusation that Mr. Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Indonesia.

Each of these moments might have slipped into the broadcast ether but for the efforts of Media Matters for America, the nonprofit, highly partisan research organization that was founded four years ago by David Brock, a formerly conservative author who has since gone liberal.

Ripping a page from an old Republican Party playbook, Media Matters has given the Democrats a weapon they have not had in previous campaigns: a rapid-fire, technologically sophisticated means to call out what it considers “conservative misinformation” on air or in print, then feed it to a Rolodex of reporters, cable channels and bloggers hungry for grist.

Producers for both “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central take calls from the organization. James Carville, the Democratic strategist and CNN commentator, has read from its items on the air, not least, he says, because they “just irritate the right to no end.”

“It was always kind of a dream, that we needed something like that,” Mr. Carville said. “I wouldn’t say they’ve become as effective as the entire conservative media backlash thing, but they’re probably more effective than any single entity.”

At the core of the Media Matters operation is its ability to hear and see so much of the news and commentary that streams across the nation’s airwaves, and to scan so many major newspapers and blogs. The group has an annual operating budget of more than $10 million — up from $3 million in 2004 — much of it donated by wealthy individuals with ties to the Democratic Party, including Peter B. Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance; Steve Bing, a movie producer; and Marcy Carsey, a television producer.

That money allows the group to monitor and transcribe nearly every word not only on network and cable news but also on nationally syndicated talk radio and, lately, local radio. It was Media Matters that widely disseminated a transcript of Don Imus making racially and sexually offensive comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. (On its own this summer, the group also circulated a photo of this reporter that had been digitally altered by Fox News.)

Media Matters says it does not coordinate its efforts with the Obama campaign — the campaign has its own media-criticism Web site, FightTheSmears.com — though some Democratic operatives have, at the least, suggested potential items to Media Matters over the years.

The hip-hop generation was all about becoming more independent from the Democratic Party — until Obama came along.

Keli Goff, a seasoned political operative and emerging pundit, penned a book last year, Party Crashing: How the Hip Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books). The book made the case that not only was the emerging hip-hop demographic an increasingly influential force, but it was more independent than its parent “civil rights” generation, which gave its overwhelming loyalty to the Democrats, and particularly Bill Clinton, who some bitterly recall was dubbed “the first black president” by Toni Morrison. The point was that a new generation of black voters was in theory challenging the notion that a person’s skin color should color their politics, and that the label of “black voter” should be synonymous with Democrat.

But Party Crashing was slightly before the Barack Obama phenomenon, in which instead of having a faux black president, voters can have a real one, if all goes as they hope on Tuesday. So did the Obama candidacy reinforce the notion that the black vote was even more Democrat than ever? Or is Obama really an “independent” who just happens to be a Democrat?

AlterNet sat down with Goff and pursued this question: What does the Obama phenomenon mean for the theory that the hip-hop generation is not in lockstep with the Democratic Party — or not nearly as much as their parents where?

Don Hazen: Isn’t this an extraordinary moment? Obama’s overwhelming effectiveness and success, and strong possibilities of getting elected, weren’t expected even a year ago. What has happened?

Keli Goff: The main thing that happened is that the political establishment and media completely underestimated (or as President Bush might say, “misunderestimated”) the strength of some key constituencies that Barack Obama did not (underestimate) — namely younger voters as well as black voters. I sometimes joke that I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Obama first confided to his advisers that he believed he had a viable path to the White House — and that path was on the shoulders of younger voters and black voters. My guess is that some of his advisers either laughed or told Michelle he needed a checkup. But here we are, and yes, it is extraordinary.

DH: And race, although we won’t know for sure until Nov. 4, doesn’t seem to be the huge issue that many expected. Are we entering a new level of consciousness about race in America?

KG: With each passing year, race — at least race as we know it — and all of the historical baggage and conflict it entails recedes further and further from the foreground of our political conscious. This is not to say it has disappeared completely, but it no longer defines the entire conversation the way it did when my mother and others of her generation were coming up and were struggling just to have the right to vote. For one thing, each new generation in America is more multicultural and multiracial than the previous one. Generation Y has grown up in a world in which kids with Barack Obama’s unique racial and ethnic makeup really aren’t so unique anymore. As I noted in Party Crashing a few years ago, the modeling industry actually began making a point of using ethnically ambiguous models (remember the successful United Colors of Benetton ad campaign?) to appeal to young consumers whose own familial and social circles and thereby worldview — from their classmates to the music they listen to — was ethnically diverse or ambiguous, if you will.

DH: Tell us in an overview way: What is the thesis of your book? Provide some examples of how the hip-hop generation — and younger African American voters — are not like their older brethren and go about politics in a different way.

KG: With Party Crashing, I really set out to explore the generational divide among older black Americans of the civil rights generation and their children and grandchildren, known collectively as the hip-hop generation; more specifically, how this generational divide is impacting the American political landscape. The key difference between the two groups is really the role that race plays in shaping their political outlook. If you grew up during the civil rights era, then race was essentially the issue you voted first, second and third when you walked into the voting booth. It had to be, or quite frankly, you may not have the chance to vote again, and that type of thinking was not being dramatic, but being a realist. Today race may still color your outlook, but it is now one issue among many you may factor in when stepping into the voting booth. Ultimately deciding whether to vote for — or against — someone who does not support affirmative action at public universities is still a very different choice to make than whether to vote for someone who doesn’t believe you should be allowed to attend a public school at all. As a result, younger black Americans in general don’t feel the type of inherent connection to the Democratic Party that older black Americans have. According to our survey for the book, 35 percent of younger black Americans ages 18 to 24 are registered Independents.

Neil Cavuto’s interview with Mitt Romney today was largely unremarkable in the annals of campaign shillery, save for one moment where Cavuto asked Romney to compare having the support of Joe the Plumber to that of General Colin Powell:

CAVUTO: If you had your druthers and could pick between Colin Powell or Joe the Plumber, who would you pick?

"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet clinic manager from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

YPM, a group hired by the GOP, allegedly deceived Californians who thought they were signing a petition. YPM denies any wrongdoing. Similar accusations have been leveled against the company elsewhere.

SACRAMENTO — Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

FOR THE RECORD:
Voter registration: An article in Saturday’s California section, about voters who said they were duped by a company called Young Political Majors into registering as Republicans, incorrectly referred to eight workers for the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, who pleaded guilty to election fraud in Missouri this year. They were temporary employees trained by ACORN to register voters, not officials of the nonprofit group. —

“I am not a Republican,” insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. “I certainly . . . won’t sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again.”

The Statement: On its Web site and in a television commercial, the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama is featuring a “tax calculator” that the campaign says voters can use to see how much their tax cut would be under Obama’s plan.

Get the facts!

The Facts: Obama’s tax calculator asks users to input information, ranging from an approximate income range to mortgage balance and number of dependents. If the user qualifies for a tax cut under Obama’s plan, the calculator produces a specific dollar estimate for “tax savings” and compares that with any estimated tax change for that user under McCain’s plan.

For incomes over $250,000, where there would be a possible increase under Obama’s plan, the calculator does not provide dollar estimates and tells the user, “You will probably not get a tax cut under the Obama-Biden plan.”

McCain supporters and conservative groups such as Americans for Tax Reform criticize the Obama calculator, saying it fails to spell out how tax hikes in Obama’s plan would affect a given individual and excludes corporate taxes in its calculations.

In a question-and-answer section, the Obama Web site says it “calculates only how individuals’ income taxes change” and does not deal with proposed changes in corporate tax rates by either Obama or McCain.

Robertson Williams, principal research associate for the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said that, while his group has not checked all of the calculator’s results and was not involved in creating it, the numbers it produces for individual tax cuts “look reasonable” given that they are for income estimates — not specific amounts — and that not all tax factors are included.

“It generally appears to give accurate estimates of the tax savings under Obama’s tax proposals — for those who get tax cuts,” Williams said, adding that the calculator avoids pointing out possible tax increases or giving estimated amounts of increases. “That clearly focuses attention on the tax cuts rather than the tax increases. But it does not appear to give incorrect results, given very basic assumptions about other factors influencing tax bills,” Williams said.

The Verdict:TRUE! While the Obama tax calculator gives what a nonpartisan authority describes as generally accurate estimates for taxpayers who would qualify for tax cuts under Obama,.

WASHINGTON — Activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap.

Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.” The summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon.

The box was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix. They sold it for $10 a box from a rented booth at the summit sponsored by the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council.

David Nammo, executive director of the lobbying group FRC Action, said summit organizers were told the boxes were a parody of Obama’s policy positions but had not examined them closely.

Republican Party stalwarts Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were among speakers at the forum, which officials said drew 2,100 activists from 44 states.

While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the old image of the pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.

Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.

With topics including his high school basketball state championship and how he passes Father’s Day, Barack Obama comes as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. This video goes as far back as June, but its a great example of how great a personality that Barak Obama has.

Editor’s note:Much of the best information on the 2008 election can’t be found in newspapers or magazines, or TV and radio, or websites — it’s on email. The article below is an email response sent out by critics of McCain’s RNC speech singling out inaccurate statements the GOP nominee made to the nation on critical issues of the day.

False McCain Claim: “My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance.”

Facts: McCain’s Health Care Plan Does Little to Reduce the Ranks of America’s Uninsured and Would Erode the Employer-Based System

Under McCain’s Plan, Health Insurance Benefits Would be Taxed For The First Time, Resulting In A $3.6 Trillion Tax Increase On Working Families. McCain’s health care plan would eliminate the payroll deduction on health care benefits, which would have the effect of raising taxes on working families by $3.6 trillion. [New York Times, 5/1/08]

McCain’s Health Care Plan Does Little to Help America’s Uninsured. McCain’s plan does not focus on “reducing the ranks of the uninsured,” of which there are about 47 million, or one in seven Americans. According to the New York Times, “The McCain campaign has no estimate of how many of America’s 47 million uninsured would likely gain coverage under its plan.” It “has been estimated to reduce the number of uninsured in the U.Sby three to nine million.” [Wall Street Journal, 10/11/2007, 4/30/2008; New York Times, 3/2/2008]

McCain’s Erosion Of Employer System Would Take Away Millions of Americans’ Insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “158 million people nationally” had “employer-sponsored health insurance” in 2007. McCain’s elimination of the employer tax incentive to provide coverage would put these 158 million Americans’ coverage in jeopardy. According to an analysis conducted by the Center For American Progress, “business owners would no longer need to cover their workers to get tax benefits for their own coverageThe entire employer health insurance system could unravel, ending this as an option for Americans who prefer it.” In addition, the McCain plan “would not require insurers to provide health coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.” [Kaiser Family Foundation, “Employer Health Benefits 2007 Annual Survey; Center For American Progress Action Fund, “Analysis of McCain’s Health Care Announcement,” 4/29/2008; New York Times Political Blog, “The Caucus,” 4/29/2008,

AP Fact Check: Congressional Research Service Showed That The Energy Bill Actually Raised Taxes On The Oil And Gas Industry. The AP reported, “Clinton is on shakier ground when attacking Obama for supporting “Dick Cheney’s energy bill,” and not just because it’s a stretch to assign the vice president name – red meat to Democrats – to the legislation. The 2005 act that she describes as packed with billions of dollars in oil industry breaks actually raised taxes on the oil and gas industry by about $300 million over 11 years, according to the Congressional Research Service. The nonpartisan analysis found $2.6 billion in tax cuts for the oil and gas industry and $2.9 billion in tax increases. The bulk of tax breaks went to other sources of energy, including alternative fuels favored by both Clinton and Obama.” [AP, 2/15/08]

McCain’s Tax Plan Will Cut Taxes For Oil Companies by Nearly $4 Billion – Including $1.2 Billion for Exxon. A study by the Center for American Progress Action Fund noted that the corporate tax rate cut included in the McCain tax plan “would deliver a $3.8 billion tax cut to the five largest American oil companies” – ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy, and Marathon. According to their analysis ofExxon’s financial statements, the company would receive a tax savings of $1.2 billion under the McCain plan. [“The McCain Plan to Cut Oil CompanyTaxes by Nearly $4 Billion,” Center for American Progress Action Fund, 3/27/08]

McCain Spokesman: McCain Opposes A Bipartisan Compromise to Expand Domestic Oil Production Because of Provisions that Would End Tax Breaks for Oil Companies. “A spokesman for Sen. McCain said that while he ‘applauds the bipartisan effort,’ he wouldn’t support the proposal because ‘he cannot and will not support legislation that raises taxes.'” [Wall Street Journal,8/2/08] ###

About

Legends Times is a news website and aggregated weblog featuring various news sources, columnist and videos. Legends Times covers a wide range of topics, including sections dedicated to politics, business, entertainment, sports, media, international affairs and living.